This paper seeks to explain when and why people respond to status threat at work with behaviors oriented toward either self-improvement or interpersonal harming. To that end, we extend the established static social comparison perspective on status threat. Specifically, we introduce the notion of temporal proximity of status threat, which is informed by five temporal social comparison markers. We argue that people construe distal future status gaps as a challenge (and thus show self-improvement-oriented responses), but construe a more proximal status gap as a threat (and thus engage in negative interpersonal behaviors). Further, we introduce three factors of uncertainty that may render the underlying temporal comparison less reliable, and thereby less useful for guiding one's response. Overall, our temporal social comparison theory integrates and extends current theorizing on status threat in organizations by fully acknowledging the dynamic nature of social comparisons. Plain Language Summary Employees often compare themselves to others to evaluate their status. If they perceive that their status is at threat or risk losing status, they engage in behaviors to prevent status loss. These behaviors can be positive, aimed at improving one's position or they can be negative, aimed at harming others. This paper develops a theoretical framework to examine when employees engage in more challenge- vs. threat-oriented behaviors. We argue that an important question how employees react to status threat is its temporal proximity—will an employee's status be threatened in the near versus distal future? We propose that the more distal (vs. proximate) the status threat is, the more employees gravitate towards challenge- and less threat-oriented behaviors. But how do employees know when a status threat occurs in the future? We argue that employees will compare their past status trajectories to co-workers’ status trajectories to mentally extrapolate the temporal proximity of such a threat. More specifically, we propose five characteristics (temporal markers) of social comparison trajectories that inform employees about the temporal proximity: their relative current position, the relative velocity and acceleration of their status trajectory, their relative mean status level, and their relative minimum and maximum status. Moreover, we suggest that employees’ conclusions from these markers are weakened by uncertainty in the “data stream” of social comparison information over time, that is, the length of the time span available, the amount of interruptions in this data stream, and the number of fluctuations in their own and others’ status trajectories.

The extant social undermining literature suggests that employees envy and, consequently, undermine coworkers when they feel that these coworkers are better off and thus pose a threat to their own current status. With the present research, we draw on the sociofunctional approach to emotions to propose that an anticipated future status threat can similarly incline employees to feel envy toward, and subsequently undermine, their coworkers. We argue that employees pay special attention to coworkers' past development in relation to their own, because faster-rising coworkers may pose a future status threat even if they are still performing worse in absolute terms in the present. With a set of two behavioral experiments (N = 90 and N = 168), we establish that participants react to faster-rising coworkers with social undermining behavior when the climate is competitive (vs. less competitive). We extended these results with a scenario experiment (N = 376) showing that, in these situations, participants extrapolate lower future status than said coworker and thus respond with envy and undermining behavior. A two-wave field study (N = 252) replicated the complete moderated serial mediation model. Our findings help to explain why employees sometimes undermine others who present no immediate threat to their status. As such, we extend theorizing on social undermining and social comparison. (PsycINFO Database Record

Charismatic leaders have consistently been shown to affect followers' performance, motivation, and satisfaction. Yet, what precisely constitutes charisma still remains somewhat enigmatic. So far, research has mainly focused on leader traits, leader behaviors, or the leader follower-relationship, and the subsequent consequences of each on followers' self-concepts. All of these approaches share the notion that leader charisma depends on an explicit interaction between leader and follower. With the present review paper, we extend extant theorizing by arguing that charisma is additionally informed by embodied signals that flow directly from either the leader or the immediate environment. We introduce the embodiment perspective on human perception and describe its utility for theoretically understanding the charismatic effect. Correspondingly, we review studies that show which concrete embodied cues can support the charismatic effect. Finally, we discuss the variety of new theoretical and practical implications that arise from this research and how they can complement existing approaches to charismatic leadership.